Flow map

Charles Joseph Minard’s map of French wine exports for 1864.

Flow maps in cartography are a mix of maps and flow charts, that "show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network".[1]

Overview

Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.

Flow maps according to Harris (1999) "can be used to show movement of almost anything, including tangible things such as people, products, natural resources, weather, etc, as well as intangible things such as know-how, talent, credit of goodwill". Flow maps can indicate things like:[2]

In contrast to route maps, flow maps show little aside from the paths from one point to another.[2]

Other types of flow maps

A non-cartographic flow map showing the relative percentages of cardiac output delivered to major organ systems

Beside the flow maps in cartography there are several other kind of flow maps:

See also

References

  1. Doantam Phan (2005). Flow Map Layout Stanford University InfoVis 2005
  2. 1 2 Robert L. Harris (1999). Information Graphics. p.157.

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Flow maps.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/13/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.